


Tempest in a Teapot (The World Spins)

by Tenukii



Series: We're Going to Talk about Judy [5]
Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Alternative Perspective, F/M, Stockholm Syndrome, Telepathic Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-19
Updated: 2017-09-19
Packaged: 2018-12-31 11:03:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12131061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tenukii/pseuds/Tenukii
Summary: It feels good to find the answer, to make everything click.  That much of the Bureau part of Phillip Jeffries is still with him.  Even Judy couldn’t extract it—or maybe she didn’t even try.  Maybe that’s the part she needs.  Maybe that’s one of the parts she likes.--Phillip Jeffries's scenes in season 3 from his perspective.





	Tempest in a Teapot (The World Spins)

**Author's Note:**

> _Fire Walk with Me_ indicates that Jeffries’s appearance in Philadelphia occurred one year and one week before Laura’s murder. However in season three, the doppelganger Cooper says that Jeffries appeared in 1989; then the real Cooper asks to be sent to the night of Laura’s murder, also in 1989, only one week later. I’m going with 1989 as the date of Jeffries’s appearance since this story focuses on season three. . . but it’s Jeffries, so who really knows what the hell year it is.

**There’s some fear in letting go.**

The bosomy woman is supposed to keep randos out, but s(he?) up and unlocks the door anyway.  Phillip looks out, and it’s him standing there.

“Oh, it’s _you_.”  Phillip’s voice drips with disdain.

“Jeffries,” says the copy.

“Thank God,” Phillip breathes out with the steam coming from his spout.

“Why did you send Ray to kill me?”  The copy’s tone sounds so flat that Phillip wonders how he ever mistook him for the original.  The copy is like. . . like a nuclear shadow left after an A-bomb.  A flat, dark parody of the vibrant life caught in the split atom’s flash.

“ _What?_   I _called_ Ray,” drawls Phillip.  He used to exaggerate the accent deliberately; then it became second nature.  He had been trying to drop it, but then Judy brought him to the Dutchman’s, and he decided to keep it.

It’s funny, a tin teapot talking like Rhett Butler.  Funny to Phillip.  Judy doesn’t understand the humor in it, but she responds to his voice just the way it is.  He doesn’t want to change it.

The copy says, “So you _did_ send him,” flat and calm.  Phillip doesn’t answer.  He didn’t tell Ray to kill the copy, but he has no proof of it.  And what can the copy do to Phillip to retaliate?  Kick him?  Punch a dent in his spout?

Judy wouldn’t like that, hell no, she wouldn’t.

“Did you call me five days ago?” asks the copy.

“I don’t have your number,” Phillip retorts.

The copy is quiet a moment; then he says, “So it was someone else who called me.”

Phillip’s mind has gone elsewhere, and he remembers, “We used to talk.”  He’s thinking of another time, another Cooper—or was it another Cooper?  It all blurs together.  This one is a copy, he knows that, but now he wonders if there ever was a real one.  Sometimes he wonders if there ever was a real Phillip Jeffries—that is, if he ever really was the Jeffries who used to talk to Dale Cooper.  If any of that was ever more than his dream, or Judy’s.

“Yes,” says the copy, so flat and slow he sounds like he’s about to pass out and tump right over.  He sounds like he needs some coffee.  “We did.  1989.  You showed up at FBI headquarters in Philadelphia and said you’d met Judy.”

The copy falls silent again and lets her name hang in the dark air alongside the whirring and clanking of Phillip’s machinery.

“So,” Phillip says when the copy does not continue, “you _are_ Cooper.”  By which he means, you have Cooper’s memories, you are an _exact_ copy, so you might as well be he, correct?  Even if you are flat and dark, you have his memories so he lives on in you, and that’s all that matters, correct?

Silence.  Then the copy asks, “Phillip.  Why didn’t you want to talk about Judy?  Who is Judy?  Does Judy want something from me?”  He speaks the questions flat, and too fast for Phillip to work answers in between them. 

Phillip turns them around with snide rhetoric: “Why don’t you ask Judy yourself?  Let me write it down for ya.”

He doesn’t even have to look up the coordinates; he’s kept them right on top, and he shoots them out his spout.  The copy will find Judy there, all right—part of her, anyway.  He can ask her all the questions he wants, ask his dark little flat heart out.  Can’t be sure he’ll get the answers he wants though.

Can’t be sure he’ll get any answers at all.

The copy fumbles in his jacket for a notepad and pencil to record the coordinates, but he’s still not satisfied.  It’s not like the string of numbers answered any of his three questions, after all, so he asks one of them again.

“Who is Judy?”

“You’ve already _met_ Judy,” Phillip tells him.  It isn’t a lie, not exactly.  It’s the truth in the most roundabout of ways, and only later does Phillip begin to ponder how he knows this.  How he can see the memories of an old woman he never met, see out of her eyes as she meets a young Dale Cooper after Phillip Jeffries had already shuffled off the mortal coil into whatever coil he now inhabits.  The copy isn’t really Dale Cooper, and the old woman isn’t really Judy, so the copy really _hasn’t_ already met Judy, but that doesn’t concern Phillip.  What concerns Phillip is that he knows something only Judy should know, and it’s not something she ever told him.  It’s something she let him see without him even being aware of it, and he doesn’t know why.

But none of this will occur to Phillip until later, after he has other things concerning him, too.

“What do you mean, I’ve met Judy?” asks the copy.  The telephone on the desk to his right rings, not in Phillip’s room but in the motel room that’s his false front.  The copy looks at it, and a smile of steam curls around Phillip’s spout.  The telephone call means Judy’s been listening, and she’s had enough.

The copy looks back at Phillip and demands, voice rising to a shout at the end, “Who is Judy?  _Who is_ _Judy?_ ”  Phillip doesn’t answer—there’s no need now that Judy’s handling things—and he withdraws.  Last he sees of the motel room, the copy stops shouting his useless question and storms over to the phone.  As soon as he takes up the receiver, he’s gone.

\--

**The past dictates the future.**

When the real Dale Cooper comes, he bypasses the bosomy woman completely.  He is only able to do this because MIKE is with him, and MIKE knows the back way in.  MIKE only comes in the body of Phillip Michael Gerard, the One-Armed Man, now that the other Arm has evolved.  “Evolved.”  Phillip would laugh except he’s “evolved” too, into something even less mobile than a mouthy electric tree.

This Cooper looks like the one from Philadelphia, just not so pristinely young.  His face holds a cautious bemusement, however, not the blank bewilderment Phillip remembers from 1989.

“Phillip?” Cooper asks.

“Please, be specific,” purrs Phillip.  It’s a bit of a joke, because of course there are two Phillips here: Jeffries and Gerard.  Cooper misses the joke entirely, and later Phillip realizes that should have been his first clue that something was. . . amiss.  This is the real Cooper, that isn’t the problem at all—but Cooper has lost something.  Lost his edge, lost his cool, lost his sense of humor. . . lost _something_.

But Phillip doesn’t catch it yet because he’s lost part of himself too, the part that had been so quick to notice little details like that.  The Bureau part of himself.  Judy hadn’t liked that part, so it had been the first to go—and Phillip was glad, because that was the part that broke first, the part that shattered, screaming, in the Palm Deluxe.

Right now, though, Cooper misses the joke, and he’s specific not about which Phillip he’s addressing but about what he’s after: “The date—February 23, 1989.”

“I’ll find it for ya,” says Phillip.  As he sifts through the steam inside—what Cooper and MIKE can see coming out of Phillip’s spout is only a fraction of what he has to work with—he mutters, “It’s slippery in here.”  Sometimes he feels like a librarian, or what he guesses a librarian feels like since he doesn’t have any experience being one.  Mostly he feels like the Flying Dutchman, unable to lay anchor in any port, no direction home.  (Back in the Bureau, Phillip always had music stuck in his head.  Associating songs to information helped the memory, and songs and artists also made for good code phrases.  Now he thinks of Bob Dylan and imagines a stone rolling around in a tin teapot.)

Phillip didn’t name the Dutchman’s, and he doesn’t know who did.  Maybe the bosomy woman, but he doubts it; he doesn’t think s(he?) is that clever.  But he doesn’t think Judy did it either because the earthly mythology wouldn’t hold her interest.  Whoever named it, it’s a good name, and it was called that before Phillip got there.  Sometimes he wonders if anyone else lives behind the other façade rooms, or _in_ the other façade rooms besides the bosomy woman.  Sometimes he wonders if Judy has other agents.  Sometimes he’s jealous.

“It’s good to see you again, Cooper,” Phillip says as he plucks the date Cooper wants out from all the steam.  It almost slips from between his fingers—so to speak—because it’s a round, slippy kind of date.  February’s a slippy kind of month, always sneaking in leap days and whatnot.  One week before the date Cooper wants was when Phillip saw him in Philadelphia, and as an afterthought, Phillip adds, “Say hello to Gordon if you see him.  He’ll remember the unofficial version.”

Gordon Cole had a dream where he remembered Phillip’s raising his arm and pointing to Dale Cooper and asking _Who do you think that is there?_   (Maybe even then, Phillip hadn’t been sure there was a real Dale Cooper.)  Gordon Cole dreamed that Monica Bellucci showed him Dale Cooper dreaming about Phillip Jeffries disappearing for two years only to appear in the Philadelphia offices and vanish again without ever having really been there at all.  Phillip had seen Gordon’s dream through Monica Bellucci’s eyes, the way he’d seen Cooper through the old woman’s eyes.  Again, this does not occur to him until later.

Phillip takes the information Cooper wants and pushes it into his spout.

“ _This. . ._ is where you’ll find Judy,” he tells Cooper.

MIKE turns his head to look back at Cooper, but Cooper’s eyes stay fixed on Phillip.

“There may be _someone_ —” Phillip begins, but he stops, confused, and asks instead, “Did you. . . ask me this?”  He only now remembers Cooper _didn’t_ ask him _Where’s Judy_ , or rather, shout _Who is Judy_ over and over.  That was the copy, but it’s too late to take it back because it’s already down the spout, coming out with his steam while Cooper watches with a little crease of apprehension between his eyes and MIKE stares in equal eagerness and fear because no one dares fuck with him—oh hell below and God above, did BOB learn not to fuck with him!—except for Judy, and _she’s_ the one even _MIKE_ knows not to fuck with.  Figuratively speaking.

Then Cooper’s answer comes floating up from the steam: Judy’s sigil.  It represents other things as well—the owl, the peaks, probably more besides—but Phillip only sees her in it now.  The sigil hovers there above his steam; then the two protrusions on either side of it separate from the center and come together above it so that the sigil now forms a twisted loop.  It looks like the figure 8, the number of Phillip’s façade room at the Dutchman’s, but it is also the sign for infinity.  Eternity.

Phillip places a sphere upon the sigil and traces a path along it until he finds the right place and time.

“There it is!  You can go in now,” he proclaims.  As he lets the sigil fade away, his steam begins to drift downward instead of outward on a draft he can’t feel.  He doesn’t think anything of it because it feels good to find the answer, to make everything click.  _That_ much of the Bureau part of Phillip Jeffries is still with him.  Even Judy couldn’t extract it—or maybe she didn’t even try.  Maybe that’s the part she needs.  Maybe that’s one of the parts she likes.

Cooper’s eyes stay fixed on where the sigil had been, still anxious and apprehensive.  Still unsure.

Riding the wave of his success, Phillip advises him, “Cooper. . . remember.”

And that is the end of Phillip’s part of the thing; his part is just to show Cooper the way.  MIKE does the rest.

“E-lec-tri-city,” he croaks, and Phillip feels time jumping all around them, the way Judy can make it do.  Then both Cooper and MIKE are gone, Cooper to the time and place Phillip found for him, MIKE to God knows where.  Phillip’s steam floats languidly outward once more.

Phillip wonders if he’ll even know when Cooper does what he wants to do.  _The past dictates the future_ , but as MIKE is fond of asking anyone who’ll listen, _Is it future, or is it past?_ (a stupid catchphrase that, the first time he heard it, made Phillip think of the old commercial: Is it live or is it Memorex?).  Maybe now isn’t even 1989 yet.  Maybe Phillip hasn’t appeared in the Philadelphia offices yet.  Maybe Phillip hasn’t vanished from Buenos Aires yet.  But he must have, because he knows he has met Judy, and that happened after Buenos Aires, although now he can’t imagine a life lacking awareness of her.

It must be post-1989 because he is here above the convenience store, he is here at the Dutchman’s, no direction home, here inside where it is slippery, a tempest in a teapot, placed there to steep by Judy herself and watched over by that horrid thing in the dirty bathrobe who stood in her(his?) garage and _stared_ , and if s(he?) wasn’t going to keep everybody and his doppelganger out, then maybe Judy put her(him?) there to keep Phillip in, and if Judy really trusts him so little then why the _hell_ does she—

His brooding is interrupted when Judy’s cry echoes through the Dutchman’s, and Phillip realizes that Cooper has done what he wanted to do.

Her cry sounds like nothing human.  It sounds like nothing animal, nothing living.  It sounds like a creaking door, the agonized wail of the atom being torn asunder, radio static on the lowest frequency audible to the human ear; it is a rhythmic, industrial pounding and straining that beats at Phillip’s steam and makes it throb inside his spout; it is overlain with the mewling of an unoiled hinge that tears him asunder and rips his heart—so to speak—in two.

Judy is hurting, and she’s hurting because of him, because of whatever he helped Cooper do.

He sees through the eyes of the old woman, sees her staggering into a cluttered room, snatching up a framed portrait, knocking another picture off a table.  Junk crashes to the floor in stuttering slow motion; then the old woman collapses on her knees with the portrait on the carpet in front of her.  She grabs an empty vodka bottle and begins smashing the blunt end into the glass covering the portrait.  In between the blows and the shattering glass, Phillip glimpses a girl’s face.

He doesn’t hear Judy’s cries anymore, but a single word breathed in her voice, soaked in her loathing, rattles through his thoughts: _moonchild moonchild moonchild moonchild moonchild_

That is Phillip’s first inkling that Judy is opening her mind to him, but it is more than he wants to contemplate just now.  He can’t even cope with his guilt for causing her enough pain to have elicited that horrendous cry.

And still his mind can’t help finding a song to associate, can’t help dredging up old memories, and he’s sixteen again, humming along with the radio, “Now it’s Judy’s turn to cry, Judy’s turn to cry, Judy’s turn to cry.”

Phillip withdraws into his kettle, pulling his steam in deep so none at all seeps out the spout, curling in on himself.  He can’t hear her or feel her anymore, and he hopes she can’t hear him as he rolls back and forth within, singing to himself.

“It hurt me so to see them dance together. . . I felt like making a scene. . . Then my tears just fell like raindrops. . . ‘Cause Judy’s smile was so mean. . . .”

He thinks about Judy’s smile, vast and rare and dark as space.

“But now it’s Judy’s turn to cry. . . .”

\--

The End


End file.
